This phrase stands with a startling contradictory purity against the elder De Lacey's
amiable platitudes concerning "brotherly love" (paragraph 25 above). Even worse, it
undercuts all the ideals for which Felix has stood as well as the intellectual command
by which he has restored his family's happiness and tranquillity. In a pinch Volney's
ideal of an open, accepting humanity gives way to an unthinking recidivism, a protective
and brutal tribalism, a masculinist belligerence, that is the moral equivalent of
war.